Sunday, March 23, 2014

No Tiny Stitches

Addie just brought me this tiny little doll dress to mend:

It was my mom's surely--the satin is soft from age and the rick-rack is starting to come apart. Addie wants it to dress up her bunny in, but it was ripped down the back. Part of me wants to mend it and then put it away, preserve it, the sweetness of it. But doll dresses were made to be treated roughly by little kids, in my view, so I give it back to her for bunny. My mom has literally dozens of large boxes in her garage, filled with her childhood doll collection--I was never allowed to play with them as a child, and I don't think she's looked through them in decades. Who knows what shape they are in? Their meaning? Their worth? I do have a little trunk full of gorgeous Madame Alexander clothes for a Revlon doll Mom gave the girls last Chrismas. Those I did abscond with, having been one of the more precious items I can remember playing with as a kid. I dress up the doll every change of seasons and put her out. Which probably makes me a total weirdo. Or connects me with my mom in some way. Ah: both.

I wish I could say I mended the dress with tiny, painstaking, even stitches. But I didn't. I only have white and black thread out at the moment, no blue, and the fabric had frayed enough I needed to gather it up in big, ugly white stitches to get it to stay together at all.

There's lots of big and ugly going on, right now, in fact. We have most likely sold our house, though we won't know for a few more days if we cleared the last hurdle, and we sold it for more than we listed it for, which is good. I mean, better than good. I'm so grateful for that, the speed with which it happened, and the money, which we can definitely use.

But we struck out in finding a new house in Boise. We bid on one, but lost it to someone who had a lot more cash to put down. And now I don't know what. Our money is not going to go as far as I thought there, and we might end up in a not-great neighborhood, far from my work. Eric doesn't have a job lined up. Unemployment has almost run out. We don't have a house to move into. I just have no idea what's next, and it's got me down.

I feel big and ugly about it all, and am having horrible second-thoughts about whether I've done the right thing, quitting a secure job and a nice house and all of our friends here. Maybe I've been horribly selfish and hasty, as some have suggested, and now everything is about to fall apart. At every stage there has been something I could do--prepare for the interview, pack up the house, scout out properties online. And now: nothing. We just wait. The next steps aren't clear. Do we buy a house without having seen it first? Rent for a few months? Fly up last minute and try to beat someone out in a bidding war? Move the kids around from school to school while we sort things out and I try to make a new job work? It all sounds absurd.

I sound absurd, I know that. I'm sad and angry and frustrated. Everyone just waves their hands and reassures me the right house will come along and that will be that, and that everything has fallen into place and is meant to be. We'll be fine. But in my head it feels like the big unresolved thing that will make or break our being okay in this city that I've dragged everyone to. There are no tiny stitches to make, just big ugly knots to jump into the center of and hope they come out alright.